Group Exhibition: It's Just A Matter Of Utility
Artwork: Untitled (How Long Will This Paradise Last?)
2018



A 24h exhibition project of the class installation and space at the Lindenauer Hafen in Leipzig.

Jessica Arseneau, Johanna Blank, Jens Dickemann, Hyunjung Han, Martin Haufe, Taemen Jung, Jakob Limmer, Lisa Kottkamp, Jihee Moon, Toni Mosebach, Andrea Garcia Vasquez, vonbrota, Kay Yoon, Kai-Hendrik Windeler

Friday, 29.6.2018 18.00 hrs until Saturday, 30.6.2018 18.00 hrs

In IT'S JUST A MATTER OF UTILITY, the focus is on the examination of a non-art institutional location, especially a wasteland in the outer space. In his manifesto, the French philosopher and gardener Gilles Clément describes the state of wasteland as a "third landscape". He describes it as a place of diversity and complexity. Or is the ruin nature's revenge for the rape by the spirit - as Hartmut Böhme formulated it in his aesthetic theory of ruin?

The contemporary art scene in its diversity is increasingly understood as a relevant actor of spatial politics. As a consequence of the digitalization of our world, we are observing a cosmopolitanism that leads to an accelerated diversification of bodies, spaces and territories. The resulting restructuring of local urban living spaces becomes directly tangible for their inhabitants. This affects artists who, as urban researchers, use their "seismographic" skills to track down urban transformation processes and make use of the gaps between them. At the same time, the multifaceted business of contemporary art is a constitutive part of these developments: sometimes by chance and often organized. Whether in the New Berlin after the turn of the millennium, the Shrinking City Leipzig, the hype-zig of the present, or in the post-documenta city of Athens, a critical reflection on the framework conditions of urban decay, revitalization, open space, scarcity of space, and crisis seems urgently necessary.

One starting point of the exhibition project is the concept of transformation as a reference to intermediate states of places that are in transition from one utilization to another. Especially the reaction to the incidents of the unique, historically often described wasteland around the building at the Lindenauer Hafen in Leipzig should playfully enable a preoccupation with the past, the status quo of this specific place and above all its possible future. This includes flexibility in artistic practice as well as the organisation of the formal situation, such as power generation and light.